The ICREAs

ICREA Research Professors form a vibrant community of scientists and researchers in all areas of knowledge that contribute to the advancement of humankind by exploring, interpreting and questioning. Have a look and learn about their amazing discoveries and findings here:

Williams, Andrew

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

CLOSE

Williams, Andrew
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Humanities
view profile

Research interests

My interests lie in moral and political philosophy and practical rationality, as well as intersecting areas in economics and political science. My research focuses in particular on questions about distributive justice, including ones arising across states and generations. I explore how egalitarian distributive principles should guide the design of social institutions that shape the prospects of children, parents, the elderly, and future generations. My most recent work examines how policy makers should deal with gender wage gaps and lifespan variations as well as the role that demographic factors should play in our response to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key words
Political Philosophy, Ethics, Rational Action, Distributive Justice, International Ethics, Intergenerational Ethics, Demographic Change, Population Aging, Climate Change, Liberalism, Political Authority, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin

ORCID
: orcid.org/0000-0001-7907-8991
Wiltschko, Martina E.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

CLOSE

Wiltschko, Martina E.
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Humanities
view profile

Research interests

My research explores the fundamental building blocks of human language, how languages differ in their realization, as well as how these building blocks relate to more general cognitive capacities. My empirical emphasis over the past 10 years has been the language found exclusively in interaction: i.e., aspects of language that serve to regulate the construction of common ground among interlocutors on the one hand and the dialogical interaction itself (e.g., turn-taking). I explore how interactional language compares with propositional language (i.e., the language of reference which allows for the construction of thought). My research clearly reveals that interactional language is as much part of our human-specific capacity for language as propositional language is. This suggests that language is equally important for the configration of thought as it is for the configuration of conversational interaction. Significantly, this finding helps to answer a classic question that has divided linguists for centuries: language is an instrument for thought AND for communication. As such, interactional language is a unique and ideal window into the tacit and human-specific knowledge which defines our capacity for language both as an instrument for thought and a tool for communication. To this end, I now explore interactional language from a variety of different angles. i) its acquisition and how it relates to the acquisition of propositional language; ii) its use in populations with neuro-diverse profiles (aphasia, autism, etc.); iii) its relation and place in the architecture of the human mind (relation to theory of mind, construction of emotions, etc.); iv) its role in human-machine interaction. Thus, my research links to neighboring fields, including philosophy (referential semantics, pragmatics), sociology (conversation analysis), and psychology (theory of mind), and artificial intelligence.

Key words
theoretical syntax, syntax-pragmatics interface, language variation, field-work, categories, language of interaction, discourse markers

ORCID
: 0000-0003-4647-3033
Winter, Andreas

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)

CLOSE

Winter, Andreas
Research Professor at
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
view profile

Research interests

I work on quantum information, especially quantum Shannon theory, which aims at incorporating information-theoretic ideas into physics. The Shannon theoretic approach has succeeded in quantifying entanglement as a resource in information processing task, and likewise for other properties of quantum systems such as channel and storage capacities of quantum systems. One of my favourite topics is the interplay between classical and quantum information, evident in the intricate structure of local operations in composite systems, such as data hiding or "information locking". I also work on additivity and non-additivity of quantum channel capacities, quantum data compression, and zero-error quantum communication. Further interests include statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, resource theories, entropy characterization and entanglement measures. But at heart I am a mathematician and will still get fascinated by classic problems: existence of Hadamard matrices, incompleteness, ...

Key words
quantum information, quantum theory, discrete mathematics, probability

ORCID
: orcid.org/0000-0001-6344-4870

RESEARCHER ID
: C-4185-2016
Wulzer, Andrea

Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)

CLOSE

Wulzer, Andrea
Research Professor at
Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
view profile

Research interests

I am a particle physicist. My mission is to unveil the microscopic laws that govern the fundamental particles and their interactions. I study what these laws could be, and how they manifest as concrete predictions for a multitude of experimental measurements that are being and will be performed at particle colliders. Devising strategies to extract maximal information on fundamental physics laws from the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider is a main focus of my research. Another goal is to identify new pathways for further progress at ambitious future collider projects and in particular at a muon collider of very high energy. I attack these questions by employing and developing theoretical tools for predictions based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity, combined in what is known as "Quantum Field Theory", as well as statistical tools for comparing the predictions with the experimental data.

Key words
Beyond the Standard Model Theory and Phenomenology; Collider Physics;

ORCID
: 0000-0002-4523-1940

RESEARCHER ID
: GIK-5322-2022
Yaroshchuk, Andriy

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)

CLOSE

Yaroshchuk, Andriy
Research Professor at
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
view profile

Research interests

The keyword is behaviour of fluids at nano-scale. I study the transfer of ions and water molecules through nano-metric (tens of nanometers) barrier layers of composite nanofiltration membranes. Another example is the transfer of ions and water through nano-porous track-etched membranes having identical cylindrical pores. I also study processes of current-induced concentration polarization of nano-/micro-interfaces where concentration polarization is strongly-coupled to electroosmosis and fine separation of solutes like peptides can occur. Recently, I discovered that a layered structure consisting of a micro-perforated ion-exchange membrane and a nanoporous layer can have very interesting properties useful for AC electroosmotic pumping . Another topic is experimental and theoretical studies of ion transfer across polyelectrolyte multilayers where we have recently discovered very high (>1000) selectivities in the electrically-driven transfer of ions of different charge magnitudes.The most recent research topic is energy harvesting from water evaporation. It has been suggested that the area of contact between nanoporous electrodes and electrolyte solutions can be effectively controlled via solvent (water) evaporation. This opens new opportunities for energy harvesting from waste heat in coupled wetting/drying and charging/discharging cycles with nanoporous electrodes. This emerging process is critically controlled by the ion dynamics in ultrathin water films staying behind receding menisci, which reveals itself as almost completely unexplored and as a focal point of a new branch of electrochemistry, namely that of partially wet electrodes.

Key words
nanofluidics, electrokinetics, electrochemistry, membrane, nanofiltration, colloid

ORCID
: 0000-0002-6364-6840

RESEARCHER ID
: L-5955-2014
Yoshida, Masaya

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)

CLOSE

Yoshida, Masaya
Research Professor at
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Humanities
view profile

Research interests

Theories of sentence processing have been assuming syntactic structure building, or parsing, as one of the crucial components in the mechanism of sentence comprehension. In this view, upon receiving the bottom-up input (e.g., words), the comprehender builds a partial sentence structure, integrates each successive bottom-up input into the currently built partial parse, and achieves semantic representation. Thus, in the traditional views, it is expected that grammatical structural constraints constrain the time-course of online sentence comprehension. Many recent studies of sentence processing, on the other hand, have been suggesting that comprehenders do not necessarily build fully articulated grammatical structures, and achieving the meaning of the sentence is not always based on grammatical structures. Thus, these studies argue that psycholinguistic phenomena are to be explained with independent principles of cognitive processes, not with language-specific principles and mechanisms. Against this background, in the past five years, I have been investigating to what extent the process of online sentence comprehension is sensitive to grammatical structural constraints.
Specifically, I have been investigating the following empirical domains: Anaphora Resolution, Ellipsis resolution, and Agreement, from the perspective of both experimental psycholinguistics and formal syntax. The studies I have conducted have been showing that the mechanism of sentence processing builds rich and sophisticated hierarchical syntactic structures during online processing, and the time-course of online processing is tightly constrained by syntactic structural constraints.

Key words
Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Sentence Processing

ORCID
: 0000-0003-2857-4121